Obama's Paris Agreement: All Cost and No Benefit for the U.S.

Submitted by Jsykes@atr.org on Wednesday, May 31st, 2017, 12,00 AM

Last week President Trump announced his intentions to withdraw the United States from the costly and burdensome Paris Climate Treaty. At a press conference in the White House Rose Garden President Trump stated that in order to fulfill his solemn duty to protect America and it's citizens, "The U.S. will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord."

The Paris Agreement was a product of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, where former President Obama met with world leaders to commit the U.S. to non-binding emission reduction targets. Under the agreement, Obama committed the U.S. to wholly improbable reduction goals of 26 to 28 percent by year 2025.

Through a litany of regulations stemming from the agreement, Obama essentially offered up the U.S. economy as a sacrificial lamb to further his own legacy. The agreement however would not just have hurt the country’s growth as a whole, but would have trickled down to low-and-middle income Americans. If the U.S.'s participation in the agreement had been allowed to move forward, energy costs would have skyrocketed, in turn raising the cost of utility bills for families and increasing the costs of consumer goods.

A recent study by the Heritage Foundation projected that the Paris agreement and resulting policies would have increased electricity costs for a family of four between 13 and 20 percent annually. The study also projected American families would see over $20,000 of lost income by year 2035. Such regressive policy hits the nation’s most vulnerable hardest, who ironically are the same people Obama used to justify the deal.

The Paris debacle was also slated to reduce U.S. GDP by over $2.5 trillion, and result in an average shortfall of nearly 400,000 jobs by 2035. Of the 400,000 jobs lost, an estimated 200,000 would have been in the manufacturing sector. Meaning Americans would also have seen the costs of consumer goods such as electronics, paper products, and apparel increase, inevitably taking more out of household income.

With such drastic costs to the U.S., American’s would expect an equally drastic benefit on the other end, yet that is simply not the case. Policies such as those resulting from climate deal would, even with a complete elimination of U.S. carbon emissions, result in less than two-tenths of a degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures.

It is all to clear the Paris climate deal was all cost and no benefit for the U.S., and unlike the Obama Administration, which was all to comfortable sacrificing low-and-middle income Americans, along with thousands of jobs and GDP, President Trump realized Paris was a "bad deal" for America and it's citizens, and made the right decision to withdraw from this disastrous agreement.